


This Midnight Land

by goldfinch



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Aftermath of Murder, Anxiety Attacks, Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 23:57:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3153095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Acquiring a drug problem is easier than faking one. Anyway, it helps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Midnight Land

It’s almost ten in the morning by the time he leaves Oscar’s house. Showered and in a clean shirt, clean socks — neither of them his — feeling better, too, for all that he sometimes catches himself wanting to vomit again. He’s always been good at lying to people, at faking pleasure and interest and compassion. It’s not like this is any different. He can do this. He can.

 _Come by after work,_ Oliver texts when Connor’s getting out of the elevator.

_ok gtg tho driving_

Easy.

He fumbles the keys from his pocket, starts the car. We’ve got to get rid of the evidence, he hears in Wes’s voice. But isn’t the reverse also true? If you say something happened, there needs to be proof. Which means he needs to get his hands on some pills. 

Later, though. That’s a concern for after he’s sat in Keating’s living room and pretended her husband hadn’t died less than ten feet away, like Connor hadn’t spent ten minutes in Oliver’s bathroom last night making sure he’d gotten all the dirt out from under his fingernails.

Because he himself might be clean, but there is evidence everywhere he looks. The missing rug, the cop who saw them leaving - he leans to pop open the glovebox for a granola bar and notices a couple off-white threads stuck to the center divide. Carpet fibers. Fuck. He knew the rug would have left something behind, said it in the car, even, on the way to bury the fucking body, but he hadn’t - he hadn’t expected them to be _visible_. And if someone else sees? If someone asks? Can he even pay to have the car cleaned if it might come up in a murder investigation and god _damn_ it why hadn’t he insisted they take someone else’s car? Why had he gone to the house at all? He should have just pulled over, kicked Wes out, told him to walk, hitch a ride, anything - then none of this - then he wouldn’t - it wouldn’t have - 

He can feel himself breathing too fast, another panic attack coming on like an imploding star. Once you’re in you can’t get out: there’s nothing to do but lean over, head wedged beneath the steering wheel, between his knees, and let it go through him.

 

 

 

 

Keating looks awful. She’s not even wearing proper clothes, just a nightgown and a bathrobe, house shoes, and her _hair_ —

He’s never payed too much attention to how she looks during class, or even during court cases. She’s a woman, and his teacher besides, and although that doesn’t seem to have stopped Laurel from sleeping with Frank, Keating is on a whole other level. She’s as ruthless as Connor is, as cold-hearted and practical as he’s always prided himself on being even if, as she’s said, most of his research is done under the sheets. But now the skin around her eyes is swollen, and he can hear the phlegm in her voice, the tears choking her up when she speaks. It’s like looking at a shaved lion, the way she clutches at her robe, the very image of a grieving woman.

“He was having an affair with Lila Stangard,” she says.

“I believe he may have fled,” she says.

“They’ll be asking you a lot of questions about my husband,” she says.

And Connor’s heart goes cold.

He’d expected this, of course, in a vague, half-formed way. Someone like Professor Keating can’t be disappeared without blowback, even if nothing is ever connected to them. And yet, and yet - he wrenches his face into blankness, into the emptiness of the cold night sky.

“Are you okay?” Michaela’s moved to stand just behind his chair. He glances up. She’d been in pieces the night before, but now every strand of hair has been pulled back into place, neat and careful as a matryoshka doll’s painted face. Has she packed it up inside herself as simply as that, layers and layers underneath, none of them visible? She wears a string of pearls and a cropped cream jacket, looking like Jackie O. or Michelle Obama, straight-backed and polished and unafraid.

“I’m fine.”

“I only ask because, you look like you’re about to be sent to the chair.”

“We might be, for all we know.”

“No. We trust Wes. It will be okay.”

The others have broken off into groups around them, but Wes has vanished after Keating into the kitchen. Fucking teacher’s pet. “Fuck him,” Connor says, under his breath.

“Relax,” she says, and squeezes his hand. Smiles. There’s a spot of cold against the back of his hand and, glancing down, Connor notices she’s wearing her ring again. “Everything will be okay.”

When his turn is over he sinks back into the armchair, blood singing high in his veins, relief and fear and continuing apprehension. He doesn’t know that it will ever go away, that feeling, if there won’t be a day he’s not carrying it wired to his bones. Michaela is up next. He watches her stride into Keating’s office with a calm, straight-backed determination. Right now, she’s more like Keating than Keating is, hunched in her chair with a cup of tea, staring into the distance.

Asher drapes himself over the chair in Michaela’s place. “Dude, so while you guys were partying it up at the bonfire, guess what I was doing?”

Connor casts an uninterested eye over his shoulder, clenches his hands over his knees. “I could really care less.”

“Well, it’s more like _who_ I was doing, if you know what I mean.”

Across the room, Winterbottom’s eyes cut toward them. “Mr. Millstone, have a little decency.” Her voice is rough and ragged-sounding, like she’s been up all night at some thankless, exhausting task, but Asher shrugs, and moves away. The living room is silent after that, everyone just sitting around, not looking each other in the eye.

Outside, people pass on the street: a girl on a bicycle; a boy on a cell phone, smiling.

In his pocket, his phone vibrates. Oliver.

_You’re still coming by later, right?_

 

 

 

 

Waitlist’s girlfriend is a drug dealer. That would be easiest. But it’s also the fastest way to make sure everyone else knows about what he’s doing, so he finds someone else.

Emily lives in Connor’s building, two floors down, with a roommate and a dog she’s not supposed to have. Their landlord doesn’t allow pets, but no one’s complained and she walks it late, around the time Connor comes home from the all-night cases, bleary-eyed and trembling from too much coffee. She’s not a law student, which is important. But she _is_ a drug dealer, which means she’s going to keep her mouth shut, especially when he edges her back against the wall and promises to go to the police, consequences be damned, if she talks - which is, of course, a lie.

“I’ll probably want more in a week or so,” he says.

She shrugs, pushes her hair out of her eyes. Her nails are bitten down to the quick but she has a body like a greyhound’s, bone-thin and quick. “Just bring enough to pay for it, that’s all that matters to me. And you,” she says, looking up, “keep quiet about who you bought it from. I only sold to you because I see you around. I know where you live but I don’t know you; I don’t know who you are or who your friends are.”

Last night I chopped a man to pieces in my professor's living room, he thinks, even as he nods. There are still carpet fibers stuck to my seats.

“Fair enough,” he says.

In the car he unwraps the plastic baggie she’d given him, shakes out a pill. She’s given him a couple different kinds, little green round ones and little round white ones, tiny blue pills with a crease down the middle. He’s not sure what they are, what they’ll do to him or how long they’ll last; he takes one anyway. Unlocks his phone.

_On my way,_ he texts. _C U in 10?_

_Yeah._ Oliver texts back so quickly Connor suspects he’s been waiting, and he pauses, ready for the warmth to well up in his chest, affection that had at one point swung dangerously close to love. All that comes now is the familiar cold swell of apprehension. But what’s one more secret, on top of the ones he’s already keeping?

The pill kicks in just before he gets to Oliver’s, a flat, soft haze that’s nearly like falling asleep. He feels even, for the first time in forever, and for a while he just sits there, car in park but the engine still running, eyes open just enough to see the stairs Oliver’s coming down, unhurried and slow. The tap of his knuckles against the glass sounds like something transmitted through water, though lightyears of cold space.

“Are you high?” Oliver asks when Connor finally gets the door open. 

His fingers aren’t working quite right; his fine motor control’s off. But he can’t even care. He feels, he feels…. okay. Finally.

“Jesus. Come on,” Oliver says, reaching in to lead Connor from the car. “Come inside. I don’t want the neighbors to see you like this.”

“I told you I had a drug problem,” Connor says. He’s too busy looking at the sky to notice the curb, but that’s okay; Oliver catches him. And it doesn’t even hurt. He could do a million interviews like this, talk about a thousand dead men without flinching. I didn’t know him very well, he’d told the officer that afternoon. I don’t think I said more than a six words to him the whole semester.

But he’s your professor’s husband.

Well yeah, but he wasn’t our professor, was he. We’re at Keating’s house a lot but he wasn’t there much, and when he was he would just go into her study, or upstairs. What was there for us to talk about? Maybe one of the others knew him better than I did, I don’t know, I’m just telling you how it was for me.

And you didn’t notice anything unusual about his behavior these last couple of days?

Like I said, I didn’t know him very well. I mean honestly, if his wife didn’t know what he was up to, why should I? You should be talking to Keating.

Oh, don't worry. We will.

And all the while his heart had been scrambling and flailing in his chest, a steady monotony of fear that must not quite have made it to his face, because at the end of it the detective shook his hand, thanked him for his time, and walked him out. The wash of relief that rushed through him then had nearly brought him to his knees.

Oliver’s palm is warm where it curls around to lay across his chest, holding him up as they walk. Into the elevator, out of the elevator, into the hallway, into the apartment. “Here, just — lay down. We’ll talk when it’s worn off, whatever it was you took.”

“One of the blue ones,” he says into Oliver's pillow, into the smell of Oliver sleeping, Oliver waking up. “It’s a nice one. I like it. I like you. I’m sorry I’m an asshole sometimes.” Jesus, what is he saying? When he came with flowers that one afternoon, when some guy opened the door with a spatula and the smell of pancakes clinging to him, sweet bread and syrup - well, the guy had been right then, what he’d said, that Connor should stay away. It’s only about a hundred times more true now.

“Yeah, well.” Oliver’s hand is in his hair; Connor can feel the tips of his fingernails against his scalp, soft and almost gentle.

He drifts.

 

 

 

 

It’s past midnight when he leaves Oliver’s house. There’s a cold winter wind scraping up the streets, tugging his hair back and drying the moisture on his tongue. The world smells like frost and grave dirt, the last fall leaves rotten on the ground.

In the end they hadn’t talked about much. Connor had apologized, and conjured some completely authentic regret; he’d said he’d go to see one of the counselors at the university’s hospital tomorrow. At one point he’d tried to kiss Oliver, wanting to claw back some of the warmth he remembered feeling when they first started sleeping together, eating cheap Chinese takeout and fucking on the couch. It had worked, but now he’s shivering and there’s ice just beginning to settle on the grass. Mr. Keating's body - and Jesus, what was his first name? - has probably been incinerated by now, but somewhere in the woods the ashes of an ornamental rug lie on the frozen ground, covered with dirt and brush and handfuls of scattered leaves. Waiting.

Eventually, someone's going to find out.

The light in Oliver’s apartment is still on but Connor grabs for the pill bag anyway, swallows one down with the crescent moon hung like a noose above his head.


End file.
